theunitofcaring:

The overridingly most important feature of our relations with Russia is that no one use nukes.

I think that a lot of people don’t actually think in those terms. I think it’s vaguely uncool to think in those terms, because didn’t you hear, the Cold War is over. And the risk of a confrontation in which nukes get used is, in fact, much lower than it used to be, but it’s still actually high enough to be the most important feature of conversations about Russia. 

This is a source of frustration to me because I think some people, knowing that Trump is making disastrously stupid decisions but not really able to articulate why, say things like ‘he’s too friendly with our enemies’ and I think miss the overriding importance of having a relationship with Russia in which no one uses nukes.

But, like, the next most important thing about our relations with Russia is that Putin feel limited in how many political assassinations, murders, terrorist attacks and annexations he can carry out with no meaningful response from the west. And failing at this responsibility also means failing at the first one, because if Putin thinks he can escalate he will, and if he escalates far enough then war is likely to result, and at that point someone uses nukes.

And Trump could not possibly be more of a failure at making Putin feel limited, at all, in how many political assassinations and murders and terrorist attacks he can carry out. And even worse, he’s such an impulsive, thoughtless, reactive failure that I think there’s substantial ambiguity over how he’d respond to tons of plausible foreign policy situations, and that ambiguity creates the circumstances in which nukes get used.

Trump’s summit was not a good idea because Trump is too corrupt and incompetent to have executed it in a way that made the world safer. Summits with Russia are sometimes a good idea more generally.